The Crow Road (53 page)

‘- next time the US wants to invade somewhere and see what happens; out’ll come that good old veto again. Heck, we got
lots
of practice using that.
We’ll
do it if the Yanks don’t. Panama? This place with the ditch? You don’t like the guy in power any more after paying him all that CIA drug money over the years? Ah, why not? On you go. Seven thousand dead? Never mind, we can hush that up.’

Could I finally be right, and a woman was taking up with somebody else to make me feel jealous? I doubted it. Maybe she had been patiently waiting for me to tell her how I felt, or make some sort of move, and now she was fed up waiting, so all bets were off. But why should she have been so passive? Was Ashley that old-fashioned ? Didn’t sound like it; from what she’d told me, it was her who went after that Texan systems analyst, not the other way round. If she’d fancied me at all she’d have said or done something about it before now, wouldn’t she?

‘- resolutions are fine, unless they’re against Israel, of course, in which case, Aw sheeit; you guys just stay in them Golan Heights, and that Gaza Strip. Shoot; them Palestinians probably weren’t - aw, gosh-darn; did I say shoot them Palestinians? Well, hell no, we won’t mention that. Twenty-three years the Israelis have been ignoring UN resolutions and occupying foreign territory; south, east and north. Hell’s teeth, they’d probably invade the Mediterranean if you told them the fish were Palestinian. But does the US lay siege to them? Impose sanctions? Like fuck, they
bank-roll
the place!’

Maybe she did think of me as a brother. All those times I’d rambled drunkenly away to her about how much I loved Verity and what a hard time I was getting from everybody, and how wonderful Verity was, and what a poor, hard-done-by kid I was, and how much I loved Verity and how nobody understood me, and how wonderful Verity was ... How could you expect anybody to listen to all that moronic, self-pitying, self-deluding crap for so long and not think. Poor jerk?

‘- we paid him to fight the Iranians for us, but now the scumbag’s getting uppity, so we’ll pay other scumbags like Assad to help fight
him,
and it’ll all happen -’

Unloading all that stuff on Ash; most people would have told me to fuck off, but she listened, or at least didn’t interrupt ... but what must she have been thinking? The response just couldn’t be, Oh, he’s so sensitive, or Oh, what a deep capacity for lurve this young fellow has ...
Poor jerk.
That about covered it. Or just,
Jerk.

‘- a modern day Hitler it’s Pol Pot; even Saddam Hussein hasn’t obliterated two million of his own people. But does the West mount a crusade against
that
genocidal mother-fucker? No! We’re
supporting
the vicious scumbag! The United fucking States of America and the United fucking Kingdom think he’s just the bee’s knees because he’s fighting those pesky Vietnamese who had the
nerve
to beat Uncle Sam -’

But maybe she hadn’t really got off with this guy. Maybe it was all a mistake, maybe there was still a chance. Oh shit, I thought, and watched a seagull glide smoothly through the air below us, over the tops of the trees and the bundled rocks that led down to the distant shore.

‘Oh,’ said Verity suddenly, and clutched her belly, and looked wide-eyed at Lewis, who was in full flight over the vexed sands of Kuwait, and apparently quite beyond verbal interception.

‘- Sabra and Chatila; ask the Kurds in Halabja -’ He stopped dead, looked at his wife, who was still clutching her belly, looking pleadingly at him.

Lewis’s jaw dropped and his face went white.

Verity hugged herself, put her head between her knees and started to rock back and forth. ‘Oh-oh,’ she said.

Lewis staggered to his feet, hands flailing, while Verity’s shoulders started to quiver. The dog, which had been snoozing at Lewis’s feet, jumped up too.

‘Verity, what’s wrong? Is it -?’ began Helen, leaning over and putting an arm on Verity’s shoulders.

‘Who’s the least drunk?’ Lewis hollered, gaze oscillating rapidly between the car parked a few metres behind us and his wife, sitting rocking back and forth and shaking. The dog barked, bouncing up on its front feet, then sneezing.

‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ said Verity, as Helen hugged her.

‘Aw Christ,’ said Dean. ‘Verity, you’re no about to drop, are ye?’

Lewis stood with his hands out, fingers splayed, eyes closed, on the rock. ‘I don’t believe this is happening!’ he yelled. The dog barked loudly in what sounded like agreement.

Helen Urvill, her face down at Verity’s knees - where Verity’s head was still wedged - suddenly slapped Verity across the back and rolled away, laughing.

Dean looked confused. I felt the same way, then realised.

Lewis opened his eyes and stared at Helen lying laughing on the rock.

Verity rose quickly and gracefully, her face pink and smiling. She stepped up to Lewis and hugged him, rocking him, her face tipped up to his as she giggled. ‘Joke,’ she told him. ‘It isn’t happening. I keep telling you, this baby’s going to be born in a nice warm birthing pool in a nice big hospital. Nowhere else.’

Lewis sagged. He might have fallen if Verity hadn’t held him. He slapped both hands over his face. ‘You unutterable ... minx!’ he roared, and put a hand to each side of Verity’s grinning face, holding her head and shaking it. She just giggled.

So we sat and had some coffee and sandwiches.

‘Damn
fine coffee,’ muttered Lewis.

Well, he had a tartan shirt on.

 
 
 
We drove back later; I watched buzzards and crows and gulls stoop and wheel and glide across the under-surface of thickening grey cloud. We were all very tired save Verity, and I must have fallen asleep because it came as a surprise when we had to stop to put the top up, in Inveraray, when the rain came on. It was a cramped, claustrophobic journey after that, and the dog whined a lot and smelled.

We got to Lochgair; I staggered into the house, collapsed into my bed and slept for the rest of the day.

I kept missing Ashley after that. Whenever I rang the Watt house she was out, or asleep. She rang me once, but I’d been out walking. Next time I called she had caught the train for Glasgow, en route for the airport and London.

Tone and Hamish’s usual post-Hogmanay soiree had been even more subdued than usual. Hamish had given up drink, but apparently found his heretical ideas on retribution more difficult to jettison, and so spent most of the evening telling me - with a kind of baleful enthusiasm - about a Commentary he was writing on the Bible, which cast new light on punishment and reward in the hereafter, and which had great contemporary relevance.

I drove back to Glasgow on the fifth of January. After New Year’s Eve, watching Fergus show off his new plane, I hadn’t visited the castle again.

 
 
 
Two weeks later, after I had had my abbreviated conversation with Lachlan Watt in sunny Sydney, I set off for Lochgair at nine that Friday morning, listening to the war on the radio for as long as I could, until the mountains blocked out the signal.

War breaks out amongst the oilfields and the price of crude plummets. From being an ally so staunch he can missile American ships and it passes as an understandable mistake, and gas thousands of Kurds with barely a gesture of censure (Thatcher promptly increased his export credits, and within three weeks Britain was talking about all the lovely marketing opportunities Iraq represented; for chemicals, presumably), Saddam Hussein had suddenly become Adolf Hitler, despite more or less being invited to walk into Kuwait.

It was a war scripted by Heller from a story by Orwell, and somebody would be bombing their own airfield before too long, no doubt.

From Glasgow to Lochgair is a hundred and thirty-five kilometres by road; less as the crow flies, or as the missile cruises. The journey took about an hour and a half, which is about normal when the roads aren’t packed with tourists and caravans. I spent most of the time shaking my head in disbelief at the news on the radio, and telling myself that I mustn’t allow this to distract me from confronting Fergus, or at the very least sharing my suspicions with somebody other than Ash.

But I think I already knew that was exactly what would happen.

And Ash ... God, the damn thing may be just muscle, merely a pump, but my heart really did seem to ache whenever I thought of her.

So I tried not to think about Ashley Watt at all, utterly unsure whether by doing so I was being very strong, or extremely stupid. I chose not to make an informed guess which; my track record didn’t encourage such honesty.

 
 
 
Mum dropped her laser-guided bombshell over lunch that day. We were sitting in the kitchen, watching the war on television, dutifully listening to the same reports and watching the same sparse bits of footage time after time. I was already starting to get bored with the twin blue-pink glowing cones of RAF Tornadoes’ afterburners as they took off into the night, and even the slo-mo footage of the exciting Brit-made JP-233 runway-cratering package scattering bomblets and mines with the demented glee of some Satanic Santa was already inducing feelings of weary familiarity.

On the other hand, such repetition left one free to appreciate the subtler points in these reports that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, such as the fact that the English
could
pronounce the soft
ch
sound, after all. The little rascals had only been teasing us all these years, saying ‘Lock’ Lomond and ‘Lock’ Ness! Why, it must be something genetic, we’d all thought. But no! Places like Bah’rain and Dah’ran were rolled confidently off the tongue by newsreader after newsreader and correspondent after correspondent as though they’d been using the technique for years.

Unfortunately, rather like a super-gun, there appeared to be a problem traversing such a sophisticated phonetic delivery system, and while the Arabian peninsula obviously lay in the favoured direction, nowhere unfortunate enough to be located to the north of London seemed able to benefit from this new-found facility.

‘Oh,’ mum said, passing the milk across the kitchen table to me, ‘assuming we’re all still alive next Friday, Fergus has asked me to the opera in Glasgow. Is it all right if we stay with you?’

I watched the lines of tracer climb above Baghdad, impotent spirals of light twisting to and fro. I felt frozen. Had I heard right? I looked at my mother.

She frowned. ‘Prentice, are you okay?’

‘Wha-?’ I said. I could feel the blood draining from my face. I put the jug down, feeling as white as the low-fat it contained. I tried to swallow. I couldn’t talk, so I settled for clearing my throat and looking at mum with a interrogatory expression.

‘Fergus,’ mum said tolerantly. ‘Invited me to the opera in Glasgow, next Friday. May we stay with you? I assume there’s room ... I do mean separate rooms, Prentice.’ She smiled. ‘Are you all right? You’re not worried about the war, are you? You look white as a sheet.’

‘I’m fine,’ I waved one hand weakly. Actually I felt sick.

‘You look sick,’ mum said.

I tried to swallow again. She shook her head. ‘Don’t worry, Prentice. They won’t conscript you; you’re far too Bolshie. I really wouldn’t worry.’

‘Hg,’ I said, almost gagging.

‘Is that all right? Are we allowed to stay with you? Does your lease, or whatever, cover that?’

‘Ah,’ I said at last. ‘Yeah.’ I nodded, finally swallowing successfully. ‘Yeah, I think so. I mean, of course. Yes. Why not? Loads of room. What opera? What are you going to see?’

‘Macbeth.’

Macbeth!
‘Oh,’ I said, trying to smile. ‘That’s Verdi, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ mum said, still frowning. ‘Would you like to come? It’s a box, so there should be room.’

‘Um, no thanks,’ I said. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, which seemed to want to shake. Finally I shoved them in the pockets of my jeans.

‘You sure you’re all right, Prentice?’

‘Of course!’

Mum tipped her head to one side. ‘You’re not upset because I’m going out with Fergus, are you?’

‘No!’ I laughed. ‘Why, are you?’

‘We’ve partnered each other at bridge a couple of times. He’s a friend, Prentice, that’s all.’ Mum looked puzzled.

‘Right. Well,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course there’s room. I’ll ... no problem.’

‘Good,’ mum said, and clicked a couple of sweeteners into her tea. She was still looking at me strangely. I turned and watched the war for a while. Jumping Jesus, now what?

 
 
 
I sat at dad’s desk. It took longer to write down what I suspected than I’d thought it would. I started with pen and paper, but my writing looked funny and I kept having to dry my hand. Finally I used the computer and printed out what I’d typed. I put the sheet of paper in an envelope and left it lying in the top right drawer of the desk. I wished dad had had a gun, but he hadn’t. I settled for the old Bowie knife I’d had since my Scouting days, sticking the leather sheath down the back of my jeans. I changed into a T-shirt and a shortish jumper so that I could get at the knife quickly, feeling frightened and embarrassed as I did so.

Mum was in what had been a spare bedroom, constructing the harpsichord. When I stuck my head round the door, the room stank of varnish and the sort of old-fashioned glue you’d rather not know the original source of. ‘I’m just going up to the castle, to see Uncle Fergus,’ I said. ‘You reminded me: there are some pieces of Lalique in the house I’m staying in. I thought I’d have a talk to Fergus about them, see if he fancied bidding for them when the contents are eventually auctioned.’

Mum was standing at the work-bench, dressed in overalls, her hair tied back. She was polishing a piece of veneer with a cloth. ‘Pieces of what?’ she said, blowing from the side of her mouth to dislodge a wisp of hair that had escaped the hair clasp.

‘Lalique. René Lalique. Glass; you know.’